First off, people think you're SO fun. You’re free-spirited, casual, instinctive, impetuous, unconstrained, uncontrived, uncontrolled. (And able to use the thesaurus.) You've got them fooled. Being spontaneous is a strategic decision. Deliberate. Planned. Premeditated. Intentional. To use a recent favorite word (I use it to describe my husband's approach to learning to line dance, and …
Author: GriffithsKL
Turning Friends Into Villains: a Writer’s Right
My short story "Turn a Blind Eye" will be published by AM Ink Publishing in their upcoming horror collection The Half That You See. The book takes its name from a quote attributed to Edgar Allen Poe: Believe nothing you hear and only one half that you see. Have you ever been misquoted? So was …
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Rejection is Protection – Jasper Black
I came across REJECTION IS PROTECTION as a part of the encouragement offered in #1000wordsofsummer, which is what it sounds like: a thousand words a day. Do you agree? Is rejection protection? I never thought of it that way, but as painful as rejection is, it might be the only medicine for my unready writing. …
The Truth Will Set You Free. Or Will it?
Two streets south of mine is a little subdivision humbly named Castlewood. It's one street, really. And while the homes are relatively new, castle is a stretch. The street dead-ends at a retention pond where a sign warns of deep water, and a dingy orange life vest hangs on the far side corroborating just how …
Judge me by my Books
In my first novel (I just began #3), I have a character say something like, you can know a lot about a person by the books he reads. My character said this because I believe this. Not that everything my characters say are sentiments with which I agree. Except the villains. I agree with everything …
Language is Not the Star
A tide of writerly emails swamps my inbox each day. Everyone has advice on how to write and how to write better and how not-to-give-up-when-everyone-hates-your-work and here's some literary flash fiction. Here's some atrocious flash fiction from somebody you accidentally followed. Here's a Ted Talk. Here's some poetry. Here's this new author, that new agent. …
My Procrastination Protocol
Recently, I read an article that revealed a particular form of procrastination that mimics responsibility. And guess what? I do it. Maybe you do, too. Here's the thing. I am NOT guilty of cyberloafing, and I recently became that person who divorced Facebook and am now living under a rock, socially speaking. I write and …
Art
Like church, the art museum offers free admission. Priceless art, for free. But no. I remind myself: nothing is free because everything has been paid for by someone. I imagine sitting before Picasso's Guernica. The Guernica is silent. It hangs there, unobtrusive. Patient. I can decide whether to sit and let it in or walk …
Fear Gets it Done
This act of turning formless fear into places and characters [is] what a good writer does. - Rebecca Moon Ruark When I have written, and my task is to revise, revise, revise—that's my sweet spot. This can only happen after I've actually done the grunt work of pulling a story from who-knows-where, that mystical place …
KL Griffiths 